Conducted Nov 21, 9:10am

Meet Asia Rollins, a student-athlete and musician at West Philadelphia High School. Asia is in 10th grade. In and out of class, she is positive, confident, and fiercely driven. She looks out for our community – for example, by taking initiative to organize sophomore prom for the first time in the school’s history. 

Asia plans to start dual-enrollment as an 11th grader next year. She will be taking classes at the Community College of Philadelphia to earn an Associate’s degree. She also made honor roll this term – congratulations Asia! Read on for some highlights from our conversation today.

Q: Can you tell me a bit first about your activities?

A: So at school I run track and I run school drum-line. I’m also in the honors program, the JP program as far as my classes go…the honors program is basically like more advanced classes that you get early on so like last year I was in algebra 1 honors and I was being taught algebra 1 and 2 at the same time.

Q: What are your college and career aspirations?

A: I want to study to be an OB/GYN in the future. As far as college goes I’m not sure exactly where I want to go but a college I’m considering is Penn State, which has a good medical program along with the sport I want to play which is running track.

Q: What is your typical school day like at West?

A: So my typical school day I have um – it’s not really anything too major that happens I normally just come like go to my classes. And towards the end of the day my last period is music so it’s kinda like drum rehearsal and right after school I have track practice…

Q: What do you do for drum-line?

A: So um right now we’re about to perform in the talent show next week. And right after that the Christmas show.

Q: What are some highlights for you so far this year?

A: Definitely the DC trip. It was fun to get away for that one day. Another one was when report cards came out. I made honor roll. So that’s one of my highlights…Back to School night was also a highlight. It was my first time performing with a drum.

Q: What would you like to accomplish academically or extracurricular in high school?

A: As far as academics go, I wanna maintain the whole honor roll thing throughout the year. And as far as extracurricular go, like with track, we’re tryna work on trying to meet at the states and stuff like that. So that’s what I’m trying to accomplish. And as far as the drums goes, we have like ~a lot~ of songs we have to learn prior to the Christmas show so.

Q: How do you think you can reach those goals? What will you do?

A: As far as academics goes I just have to like stay on task and stay focused and stay out of like all the extra drama and stuff that goes around. Same thing with the drum really. And as far as track goes, I just like gotta work on it, gotta push my limits a little bit to get to where I wanna be.

Q: How can Promise Corps best support you? How can I best support you as coach?

A: I mean I think already I got helped a lot by Promise Corps. Me figuring out like certain schools and GPAs and stuff like that. Even the college trips and stuff like that would be very helpful. And as we talked about before, me being able to converse with someone working at a hospital or something like that.

– Ivy Tse, College and Career Coach at West Philly High